Mad About the Boy

by Maggie Alderson

  And it all got easier. Once there was a bit of a buzz about the shop the other mothers from Tom’s school were happy to drop him off for me and they’d usually stay and shop a bit themselves.

  I knew we were really on the Eastern Suburbs social map when his friend Nat’s madly competitive mother, Carla – a dedicated follower of Sydney fads – volunteered to look after the shop sometimes, when I needed to go off and do something. It was clearly a cool place to shop and be seen.

  Certainly very few customers left Anteeks empty handed, even if it was just a charming old tea strainer, or a roll of vintage silk ribbon from the huge stash of old stock I’d bought from a country haberdasher’s.

  One of the first through the door on day one had been Nikki, loudly demanding – in a very full shop – that I give her a discount. While I was serving another customer I noticed her pick up the little yellow jug I’d bought at Wally’s. When she saw the price, her eyes snapped open for a second and then narrowed into her most calculating look. At the time, I thought it was funny.

  Looking back on it now, those early days of Anteeks were like some kind of golden age. Hugo and I were still in great demand on the social circuit – the success of my shop had made us even more desirable – and the parties were more fun now that we knew more people.

  I was really enjoying the challenge of having a proper business of my own and Hugo’s job was going brilliantly – he’d just had a record sale at an auction of Australian art. Most importantly, as far as I was concerned, Tom was very happy and doing well at school.

  It was into this perfect picture that Hugo had dropped his cluster bomb.

  *

  On the day of the big announcement, he’d come back from dropping Tom off at Nat’s house and was sitting opposite me in the drawing room.

  ‘There is never a right time to tell someone something like this,’ he was saying. ‘If I’d told you when you were having a bad time, you would just have said – how could I add to your troubles like that? Wouldn’t you?’

  He was right, but I was just filthy angry with him about everything. After a lot of puffing and blowing and crying, calling him names and threatening to cut his goolies off if he ever brought ghastly Greg into our house, or introduced the foul pervert to our son, I finally ran out of steam and just sat there looking at him. Eventually I found the strength to ask him the one question that was really plaguing me.

  ‘Tell me one thing, Hugo,’ I said. ‘And I need an honest answer to this …’

  He nodded, looking very serious.

  ‘Have you always been gay secretly?’ I asked him. ‘Was our marriage just a cover for you?’

  He looked straight back at me and I knew that whatever he told me would be the absolute truth. He wasn’t half a Catholic for nothing.

  ‘You are the love of my life, Antonia,’ he said. ‘From the moment we met, I had eyes for no one else – male or female. Our relationship has brought me nothing but joy.’

  He paused and sighed deeply and I saw his Adam’s apple plunge as he swallowed nervously. That dear old aristocratic chicken neck.

  ‘You will always be my best friend, Antonia, if you’ll let me be. But, yes, I think deep inside I have always been gay. But I didn’t want to be and when I fell in love with you, I thought I wasn’t.’

  ‘So why now?’ I whined. ‘Aren’t we happy? Haven’t we always been happy?’

  ‘Of course we have,’ he answered, looking so strained I almost felt sorry for him. ‘Wonderfully happy, but I’m certain it would have caught up with me one day wherever we were and being in Sydney, where everyone is so relaxed about it and you see men happily holding hands in the street, it all just welled up inside me.’

  I remained silent, as I felt he had more to tell me.

  ‘I did go to a gay bar in London once,’ he said quietly. ‘But I knew immediately it wasn’t for me. I’m not interested in lots of casual sex, I’m fundamentally a monogamist, as you know, and coming here I realized I could still have the cosy home life I love, but I could have it with a man and satisfy my sexuality as well – and keep my job. And not tell my mother.’

  He looked absolutely stricken as he said it and I felt even worse. I tried to stop them, but tears just rolled down my cheeks. He had shattered my world in a moment and while I knew that he had his tough survivor side, along with all the twinkly charm, he was still my darling Hugo, the big boy I had grown up with and he still trusted me enough to tell me his deepest darkest secrets.

  He came over and put his arm round me, wiping my tears with his linen handkerchief. He might have been hopelessly shambolic, but Hugo Heaveringham always had a clean hankie in his pocket. This time I didn’t push him away.

  ‘Don’t cry, Ant,’ he said. ‘Please. I’m so sorry. I’m heartbroken too, but I couldn’t lie to you any longer. And I want to try living with Greg. It’s something I have to do.’

  Of course that just made me howl like a dog. The combination of his heartbreaking sincerity and the idea that one day he would not be living with us any more really got to me. But eventually, through my racking sobs, which were soaking his lilac shirt, I managed to choke out what was really worrying me.

  ‘But what about Tom?’ I wailed. ‘What are we going to tell him? Daddy doesn’t live with us any more? He lives with a man?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hugo. ‘That’s exactly what we have to tell him.’

  I just looked at him.

  ‘I’m not the first man to do this, Ant, or woman. Especially in Sydney. I happen to know that there is a girl in Tom’s class at school in a similar situation – she lives with her mother and her stepmother. I met them through Greg.’

  ‘Tom’s not going to live with you,’ I said quickly, my blood racing.

  ‘Don’t worry, Ant, I wouldn’t do that to you – either of you. I’m going to live nearby. In fact, I’ve already taken a house just round the corner. Tom will carry on living here with you, but he can come and see me whenever he wants.’

  ‘Is Greg the home-wrecker moving straight in with you?’ I asked, my bitterness returning.

  ‘Not immediately. We’re going to do it in stages, so we can get used to it and Tom can get used to it.’

  ‘We!’ I said. ‘Already you and this Greg are a “we”. Isn’t that cosy? Are you choosing fabrics together? Oh, you have got it neatly worked out, haven’t you, Hugo?’ I said, really angry again.

  ‘Yes. I have,’ he said bluntly. ‘I wasn’t going to spring this on you in a messy way. I’ve got the house. I’m moving out. On Monday.’

  He had assumed his most patrician expression and was talking in his steely managing director voice. This was the Hugo who had survived a barking mad father, a glacial mother, three merciless older brothers, a storm trooper older sister and a school like an emotional boot camp. The other side of the charming Hugo whom everybody loved – the one who sometimes reduced his junior staff to tears. He could be a real bully sometimes. I knew there was no point in arguing.

  I just slumped back into the sofa and put my head in my hands. Reverting quickly to nice Hugo, he put his arms around me and stroked my hair. For what felt like ages, we just sat there in each other’s arms. Although he had shattered my world, he was still my best friend. He was the one who had wounded me – but he was also the only one who could really comfort me.

  Humans really are weird sometimes.

  4

  So that’s where Tom found us, when Nat’s father dropped him off later that evening, curled up together like two puppies in a basket, just how he most liked us. He let himself in with his own key – something he insisted on having – came flying in and jumped on the sofa.

  ‘We went to Nielsen Park and I swam all the way to the shark net,’ he was telling us. ‘It’s really really cold out there and something brushed my leg and I swam like anything in case it was a real shark. Imagine if it had been a real shark and it saw my leg and thought – yum, lunch!’

  He was chattering on, while insinuating his wriggli
ng little body between us, as he had done so many times before. Hugo and I just looked at each other. Our lives had been wrenched apart that day, but we still had the telepathic communication of a very close couple.

  ‘Hey, Tomski,’ said Hugo, giving his tummy a tickle.

  ‘What?’ said Tom, looking up at us with such happy innocence I almost burst into tears again.

  ‘Mummy and I are going to have an experiment. Do you want to know what it is?’

  ‘Is it something about a man called Greg?’ said Tom, perfectly calmly.

  I nearly fell onto the floor.

  ‘Well, yes, it is, Tom,’ said Hugo, making a mystified face at me. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Nat told me,’ said Tom carelessly, and he started giving us shark bites on our legs.

  Of course, it wasn’t all that simple. When it actually came to Hugo leaving the house with a suitcase – which he did two days after springing it all on me – and not being there when he woke in the morning, Tom hated it as much as I did.

  In fact, he cried his eyes out every morning and every night for the first two weeks, which was terrible for all of us. He would get very upset when he realized things like Hugo’s slippers weren’t there any more. So did I. I even missed his noisy tea stirring.

  But to give him credit, Hugo did his best to make it easy for us. He took Tom on lots of guilty-father summer holiday outings and would come round after work and put him to bed whenever he could. Sometimes he came over to have breakfast with us too and Tom appeared to be adjusting to his strange new life, the way children do.

  Things didn’t get really wobbly until the new school year began. At first it was OK, but after a few days there were tantrums most mornings about going, because he said he ‘hated’ his new form teacher, although he would never say why.

  ‘She’s a farty pigbum,’ was the most explanation I could get out of him.

  This went on for a couple of weeks until his teacher rang me at the shop one morning to say that Tom had been ‘very naughty’ in class. It seemed he had called her ‘Mrs Pigbum’ to her face.

  Mrs Picton – her real name – was clearly experienced at her job as the first thing she asked me was whether there were ‘any problems at home’.

  After I explained the situation to her – there didn’t seem any point in prevaricating, as she must have been the last person in the Eastern Suburbs to hear about it – she agreed some playing up was only to be expected in the circs and promised to give Tom some special attention. She seemed all too resigned to such life changes occurring among her young charges and said she was going to move him to a different desk, whatever that meant.

  At around the same time I started to notice a distinct sliding off in the willingness of Tom’s class mates’ mothers to drop him off at Anteeks after school the way they used to and when I rang Carla a couple of times to see if she could look after the shop for an hour or two, somehow she was always busy.

  I put it down to the novelty wearing off – which I also assumed was the reason for the less frequent mentions of Tom’s once great friend and desk mate, Nat, in his running commentary on his own life.

  It never occurred to me, at the time, that these shifts were anything to do with the new shape of my personal life.

  It wasn’t until the approach of Tom’s sixth birthday in late March that I finally realized what the problem was. He seemed strangely unenthusiastic about planning his birthday party. After several failed attempts to engage his interest in the subject – Did he want a theme? Did he want to have it at home or go out somewhere? How many friends did he want? Did he want burgers or sausages on sticks? – I finally asked him whether he actually wanted a birthday party. He shook his head very solemnly.

  ‘No, Mummy,’ he said. ‘I’d just like to watch something funny on the telly with you and Daddy and have oven chips.’

  If Hugo had been around at that moment I could quite happily have sunk an ice pick in his head. After that it didn’t take much probing to find the cause of Tom’s reluctance – he didn’t think any of the children in his class would want to come to his birthday party. It seemed a lot of teasing and nasty name calling had been going on, much of it instigated by Nat.

  Now I understood Mrs Pigbum’s new classroom seating arrangements – and it didn’t take long for them to work. One day he brought his new desk mate home for tea – it turned out she was the little girl with two mummies Hugo had told me about. She was called Vita, which might have been a hint to her father, and while they ate their spaghetti hoops, they had a long conversation about the relative advantages of having two mummies and two daddies.

  ‘Of course, Greg’s not my daddy,’ said Tom firmly, after hearing all about Vita’s mummies. ‘I’ve only got one daddy. Greg’s just my daddy’s special friend. And Mummy is still Daddy’s special friend too, aren’t you, Mummy?’

  ‘Oh yes, definitely,’ I said, trying to mean it. But I wasn’t feeling very special. In fact I had never felt so lonely in my life. I would see Hugo when he came to visit or to collect Tom for an outing, but I didn’t see him in my own right any more.

  Nothing on earth would have got me through the door of the house where he was now living with grisly Greg and he no longer popped in for afternoon tea at Anteeks. We had both agreed it was better that we didn’t see each other too much for a while, apart from when he came round to get Tom, to try to grow some kind of an emotional scab over our wounds. It all sounded very mature and sensible, but in actual fact it was bloody murder.

  About ten thousand times a day, I would think, ‘Oh, I must show Hugo that …’, or ‘Hugo’s going to laugh when I tell him about this …’ and then it would hit me all over again. No Hugo to show and tell anything to. He was round the corner, hearing all about Greg’s day at the salon. I indulged in some very violent fantasies about Greg and as long as Tom wasn’t around to see me, I spent a lot of time lying on the sofa watching crap television and sobbing.

  Anything rather than go to bed – because, for me, one of the worst things about Hugo’s absence was trying to sleep. After ten years of sleeping wrapped in his arms, fitting together like spoons in a drawer, I found it very hard to sleep on my own. I’d never experienced insomnia before and suddenly understood what a hell it is.

  I tried everything – hot-water bottles, a pillow in the bed beside me, several of Tom’s teddies, camomile tea, aromatherapy baths, relaxation tapes, boring books – but nothing worked. Hour after hour I lay there, wide awake, listening to the World Service and wishing it was Radio Four. Wishing the pillow was Hugo. Wishing I was dead. It really was some kind of torture and left me as limp as an old dishcloth when the alarm went off at 7 a.m.

  Apart from missing the physical presence of my husband and best pal, I also missed our social life. Tom wasn’t the only one feeling like Noddy No Friends. Hugo and I had gone out so much from the moment we’d arrived in Sydney and all of a sudden there were no invitations to anything. Well, not for me anyway. I’m sure he still got asked to lots of parties and dinners and he had all his work events to go to, but apart from a few things, like a cocktail do for Vogue Living, I wasn’t invited to anything in my own right.

  It was such a shock. I had really thought all those people were my friends, but now I realized they had just been inviting our perfect couple persona to enhance their party profiles, not us as people. As the boss of Cadogan’s – and an earl’s son – Hugo was still somebody, but on my own, suddenly I was a nobody.

  Even Nikki Maier had stopped calling me. The only person who was still loyal was Suzy Thorogood, who had taken me out to lunch as soon as she heard the news about Hugo, which was later than everyone else, as she had been on one of her business trips to New York when it all happened.

  She was really lovely about it, completely straightforward and honest.

  ‘I’ve just heard the awful news, Antonia, and I’m taking you for lunch,’ she had said. ‘And I’m not going back to work afterwards, so we can get pissed if you want to. You
need looking after. It must have been such a shock for you when he told you. I’m sure you’ll survive, but in the meantime, I’m officially offering you my shoulder – it’s waterproof.’

  We did get pissed, I did cry all over her designer shoulder and it was very helpful. For one thing, she told me that Greg was personal hairdresser to most of the ladies in the canapé set, which explained why Tom’s friend Nat had known about Hugo’s new relationship before I did. His mother, Carla, was one of Greg’s regular ‘girls’. So, it seemed, were most of the mothers at Tom’s school, which solved the disappearing school-run mystery for me.

  And there was another thing about that lunch that made me really value Suzy as a friend. I knew from reading the Sydney Morning Herald that her husband Roger had recently been given a post in the NSW state cabinet. After being an MP for a very short time, he was already Minister for Planning and the Environment, which was a great achievement, but she didn’t bring it up, she was far too sensitive to brag about her husband while I wept for mine.

  To show my gratitude for her thoughtfulness, I did.

  ‘You must be so proud of Roger,’ I said. ‘It must be thrilling to be married to a cabinet minister. So grown-up.’

  She smiled, but even through my drunken funk, I thought I saw a shadow cross her face.

  ‘Oh yes, it’s great,’ she said, not looking particularly enthusiastic. ‘But it does mean he’s away from home even more. They work bloody long hours, politicians.’

  Then she changed the subject to some diverting nonsense about how drunk and messy someone we both knew had been at a recent charity fund-raising dinner. Silly gossip about someone else was just what I needed to take my mind off myself and Suzy knew it.

  As we left, she gave me a present – a double CD called I Will Survive – The 30 Best Heartbreak Anthems. It was the most useful thing I’d ever been given and I played it over and over again all those nights I stayed at home, watching telly and wondering where Hugo was with gruesome Greg.

  I had finally encountered his Mr Right, bumping into them both in Queen Street one Saturday morning, just after Easter. It was such a shock. I had just nodded mutely at Hugo before dashing into the nearest shop, but in that brief moment I’d had time to register that Greg was astonishingly good-looking – in a clichéd kind of a way. He looked like a model from a Gucci ad, all sleek blow-dried hair and perfect pecs, and he dressed that way too, in tight jersey shirts and bulge-enhancing trousers.